VirtualBSD 9.0 Released 65
ReeceTarbert writes "VirtualBSD 9.0 is a desktop-ready FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE built around the XFCE Desktop Environment for good aesthetics and usability, and is distributed as a VMware appliance (that can also be made to work with VirtualBox) so even non techies can be up and running in minutes. The most common applications, plugins and multimedia codecs are ready since the first boot and chances are that you'll find VirtualBSD very functional right out of the box. However, it should be noted that VirtualBSD is more a technology demonstrator than a fully fledged distribution, therefore is squarely aimed at people that heard about FreeBSD but have never tried it, didn't have enough time
to build the system from scratch, or have since moved to a different OS but still need their FreeBSD fix from time to time."
Mac? Is that you? (Score:1)
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Remember Mac OSX is BSD, well a bastard offspring of a bastard offspring of it.
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So that makes them two bastard offsprings of two different forks. Sounds like there's a lot of in-breeding in the OS community ;-)
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Maybe it attracts users who are aware of behaviour like this:
http://linux-mm.org/OOM_Killer
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That's not the appropriate solution to that problem and it's hardly desirable to have random applications being killed. The appropriate solution is to ensure that the system processes are higher priority by default and that they stay that way. I've never had a FreeBSD desktop end up bogged down like that when it wasn't result of something going wrong in the kernel. And even that's not something that happens very often. Most of the time it politely panics and resets.
Planning a system where random processes c
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That's not the appropriate solution to that problem and it's hardly desirable to have random applications being killed
They say it's a random application. In my experience, it's the application with the most unsaved data...
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You can disable the oom killer on Linux and just panic on oom, if you want it to act more like FreeBSD. There is a sysctl setting called vm.panic_on_oom. Setting sysctl vm.panic_on_oom=2, will cause the kernel to panic on OOM regardless. That will give you a well defined behavior and not have to deal with the random process...errr..OOM killer.
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That tends to be a pretty unusual occurrence as FreeBSD rarely runs out of RAM. In fact in all the years I've run it I don't think I've had it happen even once. Keep a decent sized swap and you shouldn't ever have it happen.
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Same on a properly configured Linux system, really. If you get to the point where you are running into the Linux out of memory killer, you probably need more memory for what you are trying to do anyways. For a desktop I think the default Linux out of memory killer is okay, but for servers...disable that crap.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Depends on who you ask.
To some, the BSD people are giving you more freedom with their software than the GPL does ... I'm free to build a commercial application using BSD software and not have to release my proprietary changes. In much the same way, Apache has provided a vast library of code which can be used in the same way -- you don't need to give your changes back.
There is arguments for both licenses ... but having worked on commercial software which used the Berkeley DB, it is sometimes nice to have things which are less restrictive. It allows you to build something
BSD isn't about hating the idea of helping others ... it just doesn't confer on your benefactors the need to do the same thing.
I think GPL has its place, and I think the permissive licenses like Apache and BSD have their place ... because the permissive ones provide the ability to snag some high quality, open implementations without needing to sign up for the entire philosophical treatise that GPL advocates insist on. Not everybody wants that ... and if people want to, they should be able to release code which has no such strings attached.
Thankfully, they do.
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Doh! Incomplete sentences are annoying ...
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The glaring exception to all of this is the OpenBSD guys... they're borderline fascist about their licensing, and they run you out of town
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What pain? Installing a few applications is painful? What do you lack with FreeBSD's utilities? tcsh is pretty decent for a shell. cp even has the same '-a' option as cp in fileutils, or is fileutils too primitive? gmake and make are different, yet make is not primitive. Anything related to the desktop has to be installed by both Linux and FreeBSD, so that is not a valid argument. gcc is almost 25 years old. Chemisor, please answer why you are using something so old when Clang is available.
They worship stability and will not make a single incompatible change, no matter how much it would improve usability.
It is bad
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I'm glad somebody likes it. The rest of the world uses bash.
If you've tried to make a complex makefile, you'd see that gmake has many features that make make a lot easier. Once you've used it, going back to bsd make is a real pain.
Because gcc generates better code than clang does. My projects compile ~10% larger with cla
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tcsh is pretty decent for a shell
I'm glad somebody likes it. The rest of the world uses bash.
As I noted at the bottom, I use zsh. You really should try it.
If you've tried to make a complex makefile, you'd see that gmake has many features that make make a lot easier. Once you've used it, going back to bsd make is a real pain.
I have used both a lot. gmake can be a pain in differences between versions when the Makefiles become complex, especially prior to 3.81. With BSD make, I can do 'make -V VARIABLE' to print what the calculated value. That is not to say it is blissful. They are different advantages and disadvantages. However, you should be using something like cmake where you do not have to care about the underlying make. They thing that really annoys me bet
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Sigh, you do realize that the Linux camp played some awfully dirty tricks during the USL v. BSDi period of *BSD development, right. And that Linus is on record as suggesting that he probably wouldn't have bothered with it had he had access to *BSD at that point.
Also, you do realize that frequently Linux ends up being unusable do the the radical course changes that some of the major distributions put into place. The OS itself is run so that changes aren't made just to make changes. People tend to bitch about
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USL vs. BSDi had absolutely nothing to do with Linux. That was a battle between USL (former Bell Labs people) and Berkeley over who owned UNIX. Linux wasn't based on any of that code (despite what SCO would later claim), so it wasn't involved. Yes, Linux wouldn't have existed if BSD was open and available at the time. Hell, it wouldn't have existed if Tannenbaum had been more open about MINIX. But that's like arguing that the USA wouldn't exist if (like Ben Franklin wanted), the British would have just allo
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Or are you a Unity lover?
"If it ain't broke don't fix it" sounds like a very good reason to me. Sure, you can have UnityBuntu - I am not stopping you (although the usability issues might). The reality is that with *BSD, you have to install the software you want. Isnt that just a million time better than having your system bloated with stuff you don't want, and cant even find out what it does (how do you know it isn't written by hackers.ru?). No one is forcing YOU to use *BSD, and I agree OpenBSD is not very user friendly), but some of us what a reliable system that we can use to exploit the benefits of 30 years of learning.
NOW get of my lawn.
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Informative)
I've been scouring the internet for info on FreeBSD as I am interested in making a ZFS file server. I have never come across anything negative about it, other than "not bleeding edge". The words I have found most often are "Secure", "Stable", "Scalable" and "Friendly". Benchmarks show it close enough to Linux for average cases and better than Linux for "holy crap the server is getting hammered!" cases.
"And no, ZFS is not a sufficient reason to go through all that pain.": Depends on what you're trying to do. As a server, I hear it's much easier to manage. Everything is well documented and you don't get a "distro", you get a full system. Based on my readings, ZFS is f'n awesome. Not to mention my cousin swears by it for this 10,000+ HDs in his datacenter.
The only real issue BSD has is a limited supported hardware list. What it does support, it does every well, except a few corner cases. Since ATI has an MIT licensed open source driver and they've hired on a lot of Linux devels/engineers, I expect ATI support to get increasingly better over the next 5 years with BSD gaining from the Linux work.
"BSD developers want to keep the system exactly the way it was 30 years ago": They just have a stricter standard for what get's included. From what I've read, "beta" for BSD is like "stable" for Linux. It seems like nothing makes it into the system unless it's ready for the real-world, and it's not marked "stable" until it's been hardened. It even puts Debian stable to shame. When a new hardware feature comes out, they seem to jump on board for Rev3 instead of Rev1. This means they're constantly behind bleeding edge, but that's becoming less and less an issue with current computing power and abstract designs/frameworks.
It's a different product for a different audience, but the audiences are starting to converge because of how technology is moving. Linux and BSD is apples and oranges. Both are great in their own way.
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For what it's worth I have had wireless cards that only work (well/at all) on *BSDs. Firefox in FreeBSD ports is consistently newer than the latest gentoo ebuild, and I don't have a 23-page line of use flags in make.conf.
GEOM (FreeBSD's awesome disk subsystem), ZFS (Solaris' awesome file system) and PF (OpenBSD's awesome firewall) are so awesome I have to have at least one FreeBSD box.
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How about a capabilities-based security framework? ZFS? LLVM (soon)? What's so 70's about that?
Licensing issues (Score:5, Insightful)
I've never seen BSD as something that really attracts new users so much as retains existing ones.
Oh it gains users, they just don't know they're using BSD. BSD license instead of GPL means its an anti-social community, where you don't have to contribute back, which is why its much smaller and weaker than the GPL community. But if legal demands that your embedded whatchamacallit be distributed under the BSD instead of GPL then that's how it goes. Usually the best reason you'd "need" the BSD license if you can't figure out a way to decouple a trade secret from the modified source code. The worst reason would be you're violating software patents, know it, and hope that not releasing the source will keep it quiet. Sometimes there's weird philosophical stuff like hating the idea of helping others.
There is a strange "security thru psuedo-obscurity" thing going on too, since BSD is not overly popular.
Well, until now, BSD never had problems offering GPLed software, like GCC & so on. However, after the software on most GNU packages had been changed to GPLv3, we've seen them react. In FreeBSD 9, they've replaced GCC w/ LLVM due to this license issue, aside from the extra features that LLVM offers. People who previously did not have problems w/ GPLv1 & v2 are having problems now. In fact, since Linux is not going to go GPLv3, don't be surprised if @ some point, Linux too decides to replace GNU userland w/ something else.
There is a good argument for open source, but that involves companies and organizations having the freedom to pick a license of their choice, and fine tune it to how open they want to make it for it to have all the advantages of open source vs how closed they want to make it to protect the income of those who worked to make that software in the first place. B'cos ultimately what makes or breaks a software package is not the 'community', but people who earn their livelihood by working on that package.
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Oh it gains users, they just don't know they're using BSD. BSD license instead of GPL means its an anti-social community, where you don't have to contribute back, which is why its much smaller and weaker than the GPL community. r.
First of all, you don't get to call the BSD community "anti-social". It is a thriving community (last year's donation to FreeBSD was record, for example), as they continue to put out top-quality software - in fact, stuff more secure and advanced than Linux, we could argue. It's a very cooperative community, it being an open source community. When you slander the BSD community like that, you do a disservice to yourself, because you come across as an idiot who does not understand the inherent logical contradi
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Which is probably a good thing, unlike Linux which seem to be obsessed with doing whatever ill conceived thing MS is doing, *BSDs tend to be more concerned with things like stability, reliability and not constantly reinventing the wheel.
Also, it's probably going to be year of the *BSD desktop long before Linux for that very reason.
Too bad ... (Score:2)
That's too bad .. the aging FreeBSD VM that I've had for a few years now won't cleanly upgrade from the old and creaky FreeBSD 7.1 I have on it now.
I was hoping for something that was all ready to go.
Guess I'll have to dedicate some time to slog through either an upgrade or a reinstall. Or, just stop using it
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That's too bad .. the aging FreeBSD VM that I've had for a few years now won't cleanly upgrade from the old and creaky FreeBSD 7.1 I have on it now.
I was hoping for something that was all ready to go.
Guess I'll have to dedicate some time to slog through either an upgrade or a reinstall. Or, just stop using it altogether.
In all fairness, upgrading from 7.1 to 9.0 would be a big jump for any OS. I am not saying that it can't be done, but I usually prefer a clean install while moving from major release to major release.
Out of curiosity, what have you been doing with the FreeBSD 7.1 VM that getting the new one and move from there is not a viable solution? Honest question, mind.
RT.
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There were some huge changes in 8.x to stabilize upgrades/etc. Moving forward, upgrades sound to be quite easy.
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What stops you from tarring up your ~ (and maybe a few files from /etc), installing the new version, and extracting the tar back?
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According to Netcraft, is running Fedora with Apache 2.0.
Slow, but definitely not dead... make a brew while you wait! ;-)
RT.
Slight logical miscalculation... (Score:1)
therefore is squarely aimed at people that heard about FreeBSD but have never tried it
(minor) pedant rant:
... an empty set.
Everyone who has ever loaded a web page has tried FreeBSD.
Everyone who has ever heard about FreeBSD has loaded a web page.
ergo
This distribution is squarely aimed at
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So you are responsible for child labor because you buy stuff that is made in China?
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Not responsible for, but you've probably tried it.
ATI on FreeBSD? (Score:2)
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Get off my lawn!
xf86-video-ati (Score:1)
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It's crap in short. I run MidnightBSD. AMD doesn't care about *BSD at all. I love their CPUs, but I had to switch to nvidia cards in recent systems because the X driver is easier to get working and FreeBSD even has binary blobs for recent cards if you're into that.
It's usually easier to get an intel or nvidia card to work in FreeBSD. As far as sandy bridge or newer intel stuff, there is a very slow project to get KMS working and some other things to natively support them with acceleration. However, the
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>and is distributed as a VMware appliance (that can also be made to work with VirtualBox) so even non techies can be up and running in minutes.
For the non-techies who know how to launch a VMware appliance...
Unzipping an archive, reading a file called README.txt (if you are feeling so inclined) and basically double-clicking an icon doesn't strike me as rocket science.
If, on the other hand, you wanted to imply that if you are used to running VMs you're not really a "non techie", that's a different matter altogether! ;-)
RT.
Virtual machines w/ IPv6 (Score:3)
One thing that such a product would be pretty good for is that while creating virtual machines & providing IPs to their virtual network connections, they will be able to make use of IPv6 addresses, which are plenty, as opposed to IPv4 addresses, that are scarce enough as it is w/o having to assign separate ones to each virtual machine. This way, each virtual machine can have a virtual network connection that is separate from the one belonging to the host machine.
Only thing I wonder - what are the hosts on which this runs as a VMware appliance? What would be the benefit here, as opposed to running Windows VMs on FreeBSD? Is VirtualBSD something that can be installed on its own on a computer, like ESX, or is it something that can be installed only as a virtual machine?
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Only thing I wonder - what are the hosts on which this runs as a VMware appliance?
Anywhere you can run any of the products in the VMware family, or VirtualBox, but they're clearly saying:
If nothing else, we like to think of VirtualBSD as a technology demonstrator -- and a good looking one at that!
and:
We think that FreeBSD really deserves a bigger following, so if we can motivate even a single person to upgrade from this virtual installation to a real one we'll feel that our mission has been accomplished
And while there's nothing really unique about this offer, the goal seems somewhat
PCBSD (Score:4, Informative)
It was a nice experience to use something else than Linux, and be productive as well
FreeBSD (Score:2)
I was using FreeBSD as my primary OS back in 2000 at work. Was actually quite good for a work OS as the basis for my server admin / php coder role. All Windows req's handled via Citrix metaframe session.
Now I feel old. Thanks.